Computational Folkloristics: Decoding the Oral Traditions of Ireland and Scotland

For centuries, scholars have noted common threads in the traditional tales of Scotland and Ireland, but only now, with the advent of digital corpora and sophisticated language processing techniques, can these connections be examined in depth and at scale. This volume unveils the findings of a three-year research project investigating historical cultural exchanges between Ireland and Scotland. Initial chapters synthesise the Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing (NLP) scholarship underpinning the research, followed by an exploration of the processes and challenges of digitising a vast, trilingual manuscript corpus from two national folklore archives. The book presents analyses of Gaelic storytelling formulas, methods for tale classification, gender-specific traditions, and culminates in phylogenetic clustering, which reveals the evolutionary pathways of these tales. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives, this book offers valuable insights for students and scholars in anthropology, folklore, history, linguistics, informatics, human geography, and NLP, advancing both computational folkloristics and Gaelic studies.